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Does everyone need a service dog, or do I have the creepy super power?

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I got a new hard hat recently, and wore it around my office all afternoon, and no one noticed. This followed an afternoon when I walked around trying to balance a little squash on my head for quite a while, and no one noticed that either. I'd put a link to the squash post too, but blogger doesn't seem to want to find it for me.

I’m one of those people who, when asked which super-power I’d prefer, first chooses invisibility, and then gets talked into selecting flying. But I’ll confess that I’m reluctant about switching. I switch because it’s generally held that invisibility is a creepy superpower. I’d like to suggest that perhaps it’s the lazy power, or the private one. I don’t want to spy on people in the shower; I just want to go about my awkward life without being watched.

But back to the story. I started to wonder if possibly, invisibility is my superpower. Maybe I’m more than the person who can hold hot things. (Which, if you need me to spell it out, is the most boring super power ever.)

A week or so after the hard hat incident, I was in the bathroom with Ms. Clicky-Click, when she suggested I apply some make up. To make a long story short, I let her have her way with my eyebrows, and as one who knows little about cosmetics and their uses, I was pretty amazed by all that went into it. There was drawing and combing and spraying and more drawing. “Could you make me look really surprised?” I pleaded. “Sure,” said the lovely Ms. Clicky-Click, as she drew dramatic brown arches slightly above where my nearly-invisible eyebrows are.

I went around all day that way, and no one seemed to notice, but then again, what would they say? “Wow, you sure look surprised today!” Yeah.

So the next week, I was in the Permit Center helping someone, when her little tiny adorable 4-month old baby started crying. I offered to carry the baby around (by the way, doesn’t it seem like baby should have two “b’s”? Not that I don’t understand phonics, but really, something small and cute that ends in a “y” should just have more b’s. At least I think so.) So I walk around my workplace for half an hour, carrying this baby, and, repeat after me, no one says a word. That’s odd, right? Suddenly, in the middle of the work day at age 51, I show up with an infant?

By now I’m pretty sure that I do have the super power I secretly want. So the next day when I’m in the bathroom with the Lovely Ms. Clicky-Click as she is applying multiple products, I ask for a favor.

“Do you think I could wear a few of your hair extenders?” A hair extender, in case you didn’t know, is a clump of human hair that’s been affixed to a fine-toothed comb. You stab that comb into the skull of the wearer under their natural hair, and it just makes your natural hair appear to be longer. Although that effect wouldn’t really happen if you, like me, have a pretty different hair color than the extension. In my case, my hair is the color of, oh, maybe the matrix of peanut brittle (if it had some gray wisps going through it), while the tuft of hair is the color of a Barbie’s hair, yes that Barbie. These extensions are waist-length and bright, and nothing like my hair at all, and there are only two skinny wisps that she installs, so that it has an odd look, maybe that classic blunt scissors and thorazine disheveled style that I feel confident I can pull of any day of the week because the look goes so nicely with my shoes..

I leave the bathroom and walk around the office for a while, engaging people in conversation and flipping these long bits of bright blond hair around, and, repeat after me, no one seems to notice.

It sounds as if people got into the habit of not looking at you a long time ago. Did this stem from a single horrifying incident or, like me, do you go off like a car alarm any time anyone talks to you?

Once I went directly from the salon to to work. I had highlights put into my hair. Co-workers stared, but quickly refocused eye contact when they spoke to me as though they'd been caught looking at my cleavage or a big honking zit on my forehead. Not until I got to a mirror did I discover the hairdresser had fried part of my locks. I looked like a cross between a broom and a wad of sea weed. No one said anything....not even the hairdresser.

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